6 Comments to “Uncle Tom Atheism”

Regarding the schools funding debate, we can avoid Uncle Tom Atheism by recognising that there is as little justification for funding schools that discriminate on the basis of religious affiliation as there is for funding schools that discriminate on the basis of race.

Why not set up atheist schools? Since they would be strictly rational (altho’ also very emotional) they wd deliver a better education and many parents wd send their little darlin’s there. It must be admitted that education in communist countries is prob. better than in Western countries of equivalent (fairly low) wealth. Cuba is very proud of its medical schools.

Nobody–least of all, atheists–is demanding them. Secular schools, the purpose of which is education rather than religious indoctrination, and where science as opposed to the Book of Genesis is what gets taught in the science classroom, are on the other hand devoutly to be wished.

While Waziristan is probably very proud of its madrassahs, faith schools are not really conducive to the development of individuals who are able to make the fullest use of their cognitive faculties and who are able to function effectively in a liberal democracy.

Science is different from religion. It does not pretend that it knows everything. There are even now deep questions about the origins of the universe that we don’t have answers to now though it is possible we may be able to answer some of them in the future.

But the inability of science to provide answers to these questions does not prove that religious faith, tradition, or an ancient holy text has the ability to answer them. Science cannot prove that God does not exist, but this in no way establishes that God exists. There are millions of things whose lack of existence cannot be established.

The philosopher Bertrand Russel had an analogy. Imagine that there is a teapot in orbit around the sun. It is impossible to prove that the teapot does not exist because it is too small to be detected by our telescopes. Nobody but a crazy person would say “Well, I’m prepared to believe in the teapot because I cannot establish that it doesn’t exist.” This means that maybe we have to be technically agnostics, but really we are all atheists about teapots with orbits around the sun.

But now let us suppose that everybody in our society including our teachers and the sages of our tribes all had faith in a teapot that orbits the sun. Let us also suppose that stories of the teapot have come down to us for many generations as one of the traditions of our own society and there are ancient holy texts about the teapot. In this case people would say that a person who did not believe in the teapot is eccentric or mad.

There are infinite numbers of things like celestial teapots whose lack of existence we are unable to establish. There are fairies, for example, and there are unicorns and goblins. We cannot prove that any of these creatures of the imagination do not exist in reality. But we don’t believe they exist, just as we don’t believe that the gods of the Scandinavians, for example, have any true existence.

We are all atheists about almost all of the gods created by societies in the past. Some of us, however, take the ultimate step of believing that the god of the Jews and the Christians, like the gods of the Greeks and the Egyptians, also does not exist.

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Now here’s a version of this text in Interlingua. (For more information about Interlingua, use a search enging to search on the title “Interlingua in interlingua” or go to http://www.interlingua.com.